The newspaper battle petered out on January 26. According to William Berryman Scott, who was quoted in support of Cope, the Herald series “was not even a nine days’ wonder; it fell completely flat.” But Cope’s attack may have merely taken time to hit home. In 1892, Congress, eager to cut government spending, pounced on Marsh’s work for the Geological Survey as an example of waste. Some congressmen thought the professor’s book about extinct birds with teeth, called Odontornithes, was particularly disgraceful. It was irrelevant that Marsh had paid for the publication himself, or that Charles Darwin commented that the book “has afforded the best support to the theory of evolution, which has appeared within the last 20 years.” The phrase “birds with teeth” became a catch phrase for government waste, and paleontology became the perfect place to start trimming the budget. As a result, Powell sent Marsh a telegram on July 20: “Appropriations cut off. Please send your resignation at once.” With the Survey’s financial support gone, Marsh was forced, for the first time in his career at Yale, to accept a salary. He died in 1899.

Subscribe Today

• Did you enjoy our article?
• Read more in American History magazine
• Subscribe online and save nearly 40%!!!
 

Cope had died two years earlier and had willed his body to science as an anatomical specimen for students to study. But that wasn’t the end of his story. In 1993 a National Geographic photographer named Louis Psihoyos obtained Cope’s skull from the University of Pennsylvania and took it with him as he traveled around the world interviewing paleontologists for a book. He referred to the skull as “Eddie.” Later, he and paleontologist Robert Bakker tried to have the skull named as the “type specimen”–the standard of a species to which all others are compared–for Homo sapiens. “In all branches of Natural Science, type specimens are the lights that mark the present boundaries of knowledge,” wrote one scientist in the nineteenth century. “They should be, therefore, not will-o-the-wisps, leading unwary votaries of science astray, but fixed beacon lights to guide and encourage investigators in their search for new truth.”

Those words were written by Othniel Charles Marsh, and it’s safe to assume he wouldn’t have wanted them applied to his hated rival. In any event, the effort to turn Cope into a type specimen was a futile one. It turned out that Swiss botanist Carolus Linnaeus, the man who created the scientific naming system that classes specimens based on genus and species, had received that honor in 1959. Edward Drinker Cope had been trumped one last time.

[ Top ] [ Cover ]

Help HistoryNet by bookmarking to